Tuesday, April 23, 2019

A NATION UNRAVELS - E JEFFREY LUDWIG - AMERICA'S IMPLODING EDUCATION SYSTEM

Our Imploding Educational System



Education in the U.S. is imploding.  The Horatio Alger ideals of education depicting the conditions for successful fulfillment of one’s ambitions have been superseded by the ideas and ideals of John Dewey.  His ideals enunciated inSchool and Society and in A Common Faith suggest the replacement of self-conscious, ambitious individuality with the replacement of a highly socialized citizen whose “faith” is in democracy and working together with others as a useful citizen.  The great books curricula, popular in the 1890s, was debunked.  Despite his romanticization of socialistic concepts (hidden behind the word “democracy,” a tactic not unlike that of Sen. Bernie Sanders), his views represent an attack on the individual, the family, and the foundation of America in Judeo-Christian values. 
For millions, school today is simply a developmental requirement with its institutional mores and requirements, a series of hurdles to be overcome and disengaged from as soon as one reaches adulthood.  The Deweyan ideal of collectivization and conformity to the industrial demands of   mass production of everything from medical care to toilet paper has supplanted the Horatio Alger ideals of pre-industrial, Christian, individualistic American society.  Today’s updated Deweyans on the left are more apt to admire Alger Hiss than Horatio Alger.
This writer, having spent decades in secondary and higher education, has perceived that the work ethic is eerily absent. Slaves or deprived/oppressed peoples may work hard, but cannot be said to uphold the work ethic which means a healthy respect and joyful participation in the work at hand as an opportunity coming from a loving God.  When we embrace our work with a sense of that work as being part of our moral duty to God and man, we are truly socialized.  How many students in our schools have this attitude towards their studies?  Or teachers towards their teaching?  Instead of study-esteem, we find emphasis on self-esteem.  Instead of a vision of becoming a man or woman of competence or knowledge, most educators and students are working towards an implied goal depicted by Abraham Maslow as self-actualization, an ideal of happiness defined as meeting of one’s needs.  Meeting of needs rather than competence achieved through knowledge is both a result of and also leads to the left’s attachment to the “gimme gimme” philosophy.  Meeting my needs is paramount: me me me.
School reform has not been addressing this shift in purpose, which defines education as helping the students meet their needs, rather than increasing their competence to meet the needs of others, and to become better able to exercise their individual liberty.  An informed mind in an individual who is disciplined and virtuous is more likely to reach the goal of happiness described by Plato and Aristotle and by Christian philosophers throughout the centuries.  Although our happiness on this Earth is always imperfect, nevertheless when connected to enhancement of individuality, service to others, and competence, happiness becomes more attainable than the vain search to meet one’s needs and to “fit in” with some amorphous, mystical vanity called by Jean-Jacques Rousseau “the general will” or by certain social justice warriors “the state of perfect communist equality.”
School reform is feeding the wet dreams of the bureaucratic organizational manipulators and the empires of educational publishers like Cengage, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw Hill, and Pearson, which are turning out billions of dollars worth of educational software.  Reform today is a zeal for statistics, systems, savings, software, and for the federal government setting the parameters for this reform rather than local control.  Teachers are increasingly being called “facilitators” who guide students through the technological maze.  Students whom Dewey wished to see happily take their places in industrial society are now envisioned to be conforming to the work requirements of a technology-driven society.  The system becomes the definitive collective dimension into which the well-adjusted person fits in order to meet his or her needs.  The dignity and worth of the individual is being sacrificed in favor of this vision or orientation.
As early as 1977, Christopher Lasch, a liberal, in his classic book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, alerted us to the narcissism growing at an exponential rate in society.  And as early as 1926, speaking at Congressional hearings, the great Princeton professor J. Grescham Machen argued against expansion of federal involvement in education. He argued that education is not a matter of the State, but should be left to each child’s parents to educate their children as they please. He prophesied the trend we are now seeing, that uniformity in education always leads to the lowest common denominator.  Would the reader agree that the lowest common denominator is found in ignorance, disrespect of teachers, lack of attention, and lack of cooperation?
Does one have to be a professor to see that every moral standard in society is collapsing?  Goodness and Judeo-Christian values are openly mocked every day on TV and by teachers throughout the land.  In schools, condoms are distributed, and sex education indicates no preference for the love-sex-marriage unity being the best paradigm. This writer taught at one inner-city high school where female students could go to a special counseling office for a ten or fifteen-minute meeting with a pregnancy counsellor, and then be referred for an abortion, without notifying a parent or caregiver, which is legal in my state. Another high school where this writer taught had a yearly Senior Cross Dressing Day where any senior males who wished to could come to school wearing a dress, bra, make-up, wig, high heels, nail polish, and eye liner.   
Schools give us examples of behavior and communicate attitudes of teachers and administrators. Methods of learning and spoken as well as unspoken assumptions about the purpose of gaining knowledge shape our understanding of the purpose and meaning of learning and life.  With the schools no longer operating in loco parentis but instead seeking parental support for the so-called mission of the schools, the schools -- with many false values -- are shaping and negatively impacting our expectations, hopes, decisions, and what matters we focus our attention upon.
The "body of knowledge" for each subject should come back to the fore as the key to a meaningful education and not merely statistics about graduation rates, passing rates on standardized tests, and the implementation of tablets, smart boards, and other software innovations. We also need to restore prayer in the schools, family values, and patriotism (where the inspirational aspects of the U.S.A. and Western civilization are placed front and center rather than themes of oppression and victimization). If the reader does not think this is possible, please pray for it. 
With Common Core State [sic] Standards, we are on the very brink of the wholly manipulated society (notice, "manipulated," not educated).  Our system of public education is becoming depersonalized and loveless to an extreme, and where knowledge and character building were once paramount, we now find emphasis on self-esteem and neglect of essential intellectual and practical skills. Mass deception and hypocrisy about education has never been more rife.
E. Jeffrey Ludwig is a Harvard University Master Teacher who has been listed multiple times in Who’s Who Among America’s High School Teachers and served on the Editorial Board of the Harvard Educational Review. His latest book, The Catastrophic Decline of America’s Public High Schools, is availablehere.  Despite his Harvard training, he continues to believe in local control over schools as required by the Tenth Amendment, and is opposed to all elitist takeover strategies.





Are Millennials Educable?


 

Picture ten-year-old Johnny, his masculinity threatened on every level, his mental and physical energy denied expression, his home life hectic and unsupportive, his continued inability to read becoming more debilitating every year, and his boredom level off any available chart.  Imagine being him.  We know that his disadvantages will not be met in 5th grade any more than they were in 1st.  We know – looking at the recent educational studies – that in seven years, he will graduate, in much the same condition, if he graduates at all.  Given the odd assumption that graduation proves effective education, and the pressure schools are under to up graduation numbers, he probably will walk away with a diploma, but it will be meaningless.
We know that the graduation rate and the proficiency levels no longer correlate at all.  Over 80% of our high school seniors "earn" diplomas, but 37% of them can read at grade level.  Twenty-five percent of them can do math at grade level.  And yet our schools are more concerned about programming young people for sexual deviancy and multicultural hatred of their own country than they are in turning out thinking, informed, skilled adults.
Why can't our schools fix this problem?  There are many answers – teachers' unions, left-leaning educational institutions, leftist textbooks, etc.  But our schools are filled with wonderful teachers working appalling hours and wanting desperately to see their students learn.  What is in their way?  How is it these kids can get all the way through 13 years of schooling and know nothing?
Look back at Johnny.  In first grade, he didn't learn to read, but what happened to him? He went on to 2nd grade, where he had even less opportunity to figure it out.  But did he stay in 2nd grade or a remedial class until he caught on?  No.  On to 3rd, where his dismal scores on standardized tests demonstrate clearly his inabilities, but still nothing will be done.
One year, during my tenure as a high school English teacher, we were required to attend evening classes instructing us in how to teach our students to read – in addition to everything else we were supposed to be inculcating.  The lessons in these classes were all geared to 3rd grade, which bothered us all – if this approach didn't work when these kids were eight-year-olds, why would it work when they're 17?  I asked about the viability of this approach for high school, and the instructor admitted that they had no idea how to rescue a teenager who had never mastered reading.
Fifty years ago, schools quit holding Johnny back a grade when he didn't reach the set standards.  Administrators deemed it too rough on his ego to admit his problem and fix it.  We would damage his self-esteem, and we heard over and over again that the self-esteem deficit would render any increase in skill null and void.  No one ever proved that, but say something often enough, and it becomes gospel.  No one considered what damage Johnny's ego would sustain in high school when reading and writing and computing skills were both assumed and necessary.
Once the schools cannot hold kids back because they haven't mastered reading and math, then subsequent teachers are under pressure – political, professional, and pragmatic – to keep the momentum going.
Some dumbing down has to happen if a teacher has a classroom full of students below grade level.  There is nothing to be gained by failing them all.  And as teachers, we are taught to meet our students where they actually are.  That is good pedagogy.
However, if an instructor's students don't meet the standard, the teacher gets in trouble, the students become demoralized, and the parents get angry.  Angry parents make for nervous and defensive administrators who, in turn, pressure the teachers into – what?  Passing the students whether they've cleared the hurdles or not.
This continues until high school when the problem just blows up.  Unless the district chooses to do what my district did: we "raised the bar."  You've got to love educational jargon.  We did this by:
1. Cutting out the "D" as a grade option – which merely inflated the grades.
2. Demanding that students turn in all assignments.  I know: this doesn't seem out of line, but most students miss an assignment now and then, and no one could see that a do-or-die turn-in policy only erased the ability to insist on due dates.  We couldn't legally fail a kid for being late on an assignment.  One of my students said to me one day, "Ah, due dates, schmue dates."  Kids were turning in papers months late, and we had to accept them.
3. Forcing kids into honors-level classes whether they are capable or not.  And then when too many began failing, the administration demanded that teachers dumb down the curricula.  Then the following year, students were assigned to the next level up, and they weren't ready to do the work, because the previous curricula had been so simplified.  That was "raising the bar."
Then these kids go off to college, and the colleges face the same problems.  I'd like very much to increase the rigor of the college classes I teach – in spite of the fact that transfer students find my classes much more rigorous than their state junior college classes have been.  But if I really expected kids to actually function at what we used to call "college" level, they'd fail.  It's mind-boggling, and frustrating, and knowing where it came from is not much help.
It's not as if we don't know what can be done about it.  In the last couple of decades, brain research has taught us quite a bit about how the brain learns.  We know that the more background knowledge a child has, the better a reader he will be – yet we spend most of the school day drilling kids on "reading skills" rather than teaching them anything factual.  We know that movement plays a big role in brain development, yet we cut back on recess.  We know music and art improve brain function, but we cut art.
We must remember that the original purpose of John Dewey's educational scheme never was to produce thinking, critical, knowledgeable human beings.  It was to create drones.  We have succeeded in that.
Plus, the society in general discourages facing ugly truths and makes pretending fairly easy for a long period of time, but here in 2018, it's clear that the make-believe fairy tale is over.  Millennials are finding that they are tens of thousands of dollars in debt, yet they know little that is actually true.  They have learned attitudes but not facts.  We've hit that wall.
What does public education do?  Nothing.  I've been involved, either willingly or otherwise, in half a dozen educational reforms designed to fix our problems.  They all fail.  The solution lies outside the auspices of government and teacher unions.  The responsibility for educating our young has to start with the family.  It can easily blossom into private enterprise, charter schools, and school vouchers.  The homeschooling industry is thriving, and so are the students educated at home.
For the last nine years, I've been involved in building a school, a Bible-based junior college.  Accreditation took us that long, and raising money isn't easy, but it can be done.  We can crawl out from under the crushing weight of a system devoid of reality.  We just have to begin.
Deana Chadwell blogs at www.ASingleWindow.com.  She is also an adjunct professor and department head at Pacific Bible College in southern Oregon.  She teaches writing and public speaking.



One cautionary example is President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose ticket into Harvard, according to the 2006 book The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges, was his father’s $2.5 million dollar gift to the university. Jared got his Harvard degree, but he has been the butt of social-media taunts precisely because his daddy had to pay a fortune to get the school to admit him. The cost of a brag-worthy degree? Millions. The cost of the right- and left-brain stuff? Priceless.

CITY JOURNAL

WHAT THE COLLEGE-ADMISSIONS 

SCANDAL TELL US ABOUT AMERICA’S 

BROKEN MERITOCRACY

If, like me, you’re an avid observer of human affairs at their most vain and status-crazed, you have been studying the College Cheating Scandal, or what investigators called Operation Varsity Blues, with all the intensity of a rabbinical scholar poring over Leviticus. Each reading yields delicious new details of greed, ambition, hypocrisy, and decadence. “Ah! Vanitas, Vanitatum!” as the author of the classic nineteenth-century novel Vanity Fair sighed. But eventually the mordant fun gives way to the recognition that what we have here is evidence of a serious sickness in the American meritocracy.
The story is well known by now, but before it disappears into the overflowing landfill of tawdry contemporary Americana, some of its more obscure gems deserve a farewell salute. Let’s begin with the master of ceremonies, William “Rick” Singer, owner of a Newport Beach, California college-consulting company. Singer bribed college coaches and staged mockups of his clients’ slacker children at athletic events, sometimes photoshopping their faces onto a picture of actual soccer players or rowers, or, weirdly, pole-vaulters. A 36-year-old Harvard grad, Mark Riddell, could take a standardized test and get an agreed-upon, specific score with the precision of an expert archer. Singer hired him to take or to correct tests for clients whose preliminary scores would put them on the reject pile: Riddell is now Cooperating Witness #2. My favorite bit of chicanery was Singer’s money-laundering operation. To hide the eye-catching sums that he was earning for his ploys—and to give his clients the extra perk of a (legal) tax deduction for their (illegal) contributions—Singer set up the Key Worldwide Foundation, which he advertised as “provid[ing] guidance, encouragement and opportunity to disadvantaged students around the world.” The IRS estimates that Singer earned $25 million for his good works.
The charitable donors are a treasure trove of you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up farce. Jane Buckingham, Beverly Hills mother and businesswoman, paid Singer $50,000 to have Ridell take her son’s ACT for him so that he could score high enough to get into the University of Southern California; Ridell got the boy a 35 out of 36. Earlier in her career, Buckingham had parlayed her expertise as a “youth marketing specialist” into a TV show, Job or No Job, offering millennials career advice. Evidently she forgot what she told an interviewer at the Observerwhen she described some of the young people who came on her show as “so entitled that you want to slap them.” Another donor was Willkie Farr & Gallagher co-chair Gordon Caplan, named as The American Lawyer’s 2018 Dealmaker of the Year. Also in the lineup are actress Felicity Huffman and her husband William Macy, most recently star of a television series called—will the dark irony never stop?—Shameless. For reasons not entirely clear, Macy has not yet been indicted.
First prize for sheer gall goes to actress Lori Loughlin and her fashion-designer husband Massimo Giannulli. The two paid Singer a half-million to package their daughters as accomplished rowers in order to buy their place in the University of Southern California freshman class, though evidently neither girl knew the difference between a coxswain and an entry on Pornhub. Nor, at least in Olivia’s case, were they thinking much about their course load. As it happens, Olivia spent the first week of school in Fiji. She wasn’t there to visit the renowned libraries of the South Pacific, but for a photo shoot in her role as a “social media influencer.” Using the stage name Olivia Jade, she video-splained to her 1.9 million followers that, while she would be doing a lot of traveling for her career, “I do want the experience of, like, game days, partying. I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.”
A few final, irresistible details about the dewy Loughlin: the actress made her name on the hit sitcom Full House. She played Aunt Becky to the golden-girl Olsen twins. Aunt Becky was supposed to be the show’s moral compass; in one episode, she marched into the office of a preschool admissions director to tell on her husband for lying on his niece’s application. Back in the real world, Loughlin went on to groom her own daughter for a future on the red carpet—witness the Internet photos of the luminous mother and daughter posing at celebrity events and gabbing on The Today Show. It seems unlikely that Olivia Jade could have collected her Sephora, Amazon, and Dolce Gabbana deals on her own; her doting mother was the influencer there. In short, the Hallmark-wholesome Aunt Becky turns out to be a modern-day Becky Sharp.
This kind of arrogance, greed, and ambition has been the stuff of literary satire and philosophical reflection throughout the ages. What sets Operation Varsity Blues apart and caused the public outrage, of course, is its American context. The parents were not seeking riches, fame, or even elite status in any conventional sense: they already had that. Between the two of them, Felicity Huffman and Bill Macy are estimated to be worth $45 million; their daughters would never be lacking in American Express black cards or invitations to friends’ Aspen chalets. Olivia Jade was already on her way to online stardom, at least within her peer group.
No, they were not looking for financial rewards or klieg lights. What they wanted was for their kids to fit in as members of the cognitive elite. Anand Giridharadas, NBC political analyst and fire-and-brimstone scourge of America’s richest, tweeted about the scandal that America’s ruling class “confuses its privilege for merit.” That’s exactly backward. The Operation Varsity parents opened their wallets precisely because they knew their children did not have the right stuff. They wanted elite status for their children, and in a meritocracy, even one as tattered as our own, high SATs and extracurriculars leading to a hoity-toity college degree are the ticket. The parents of Operation Varsity will probably get over the humiliation of a mugshot, but their kids will never live down being outed as meritocratic losers.
Which takes us to the only good news in this whole sordid affair: buying your way into cognitive-elite respectability is trickier than anyone thought. Even if you avoid jail, you are surrounded by people who are expert at sniffing out meritocratic poseurs, namely those with modest IQs. One cautionary example is President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose ticket into Harvard, according to the 2006 book The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges, was his father’s $2.5 million dollar gift to the university. Jared got his Harvard degree, but he has been the butt of social-media taunts precisely because his daddy had to pay a fortune to get the school to admit him. The cost of a brag-worthy degree? Millions. The cost of the right- and left-brain stuff? Priceless.
The current system of college admission doesn’t have many defenders at this point. Everyone knows that it corrupts us all: the high school teachers who feel obliged to inflate the talents of their ordinary students, the therapists selling their professional credentials to parents who want special-disability diagnoses for their healthy kids so that they have extra time to take their exams, the middle-class parents who have neither the funds nor the stomach to violate the law but help create the panic that is driving their kids (and their educators) out of their minds. Worst of all, it demoralizes less-advantaged kids and their parents, who are already tempted toward resentment-filled hopelessness.
For all higher education’s sins, though, there’s no easy way to fix its role in the broken meritocracy. Limit legacies and sports admits? Sure. Look skeptically at résumés filled with service trips to Guatemalan villages and computer camps? Yes, please. But an increasingly high-tech economy will have to reward those who can decipher complicated deals, program robots, and pursue similarly complex cognitive tasks. The challenge is to reduce the prestige and honor attached to those talents and rewards—and to the schools that develop them. Ironically, Operation Varsity Blues may be a step in that direction.


NOW WHY SHOULD AMERICANS (LEGALS) PAY FOR AN EDUCATION WHEN THE SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP IS BRINGING OVER BOATLOADS OF “CHEAP” LABOR WHO ALL RECEIVED FREE EDUCATIONS?!?!

Ivanka Trump Wants America to Kick Addiction to Four-Year College, Massive Student Debt

 

https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2019/03/21/ivanka-trump-wants-america-kick-addiction-four-year-college/

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
JOHN CARNEY
 

America’s ever-deepening college debt problem is really a symptom of a worse malady: our societal addiction to college itself.

Any sober assessment of the facts would indicate that too many Americans are going to college. As a result, college costs—and debt—have skyrocketed while the rewards for college have plunged.
Yet this is something that has escaped the attention of our political elites. And, as it turns out, our financial and cultural elites—as the recent college admissions scandal indicates. Many Democrats want to double-down, promising “free college” to young people—a euphemism for college funded by taxpayers.
Perhaps surprisingly, Ivy-league educated Ivanka Trump has recently come out as a skeptic about America’s love affair with college. The first daughter has taken up a leadership role in the Trump administration’s workforce development efforts—and shown a remarkable candidness when it comes to our college problem.
“I think culturally, for a long time we have created and perpetuated the narrative that there is one pathway to achieving the American dream and its four-year university,” Ms. Trump said in a recent interview.
Trump goes on:
That has been instilled into American students, it’s often American parents that feel that is the only viable path. So you have kids going into school racking up enormous amounts of student debt that they’ll often take decades if there ever able to pay it off without a skill, if they ultimately graduate. So I think opening up the prism and saying there are many different pathways. It depends what you want in your life and taking the stigma away from those who choose alternative pathways who choose technical schools, vocational education. At the end of the day, it’s about connecting workers with their passion, with their jobs. There’s very little opportunity for somebody who wants to the vocational route, the technical route because all the money pushes you into a four-year college system.
Just as her father drew attention to the incredibly bad hand American industrial workers had been dealt by decades of anti-American trade deals, Ms. Trump is drawing attention to the bad hand the U.S. has dealt our young people.
The facts are stark. Over the past 40 years, the U.S. has doubled the share of high school graduates who go on to get college degrees. Forty-six percent of high school graduates receive degrees from four-year colleges, and another 24 percent get degrees from two-year colleges.
This increase in college education, however, has come at a steep cost. The relative benefits of a college degree have been declining for nearly two decades, while costs have been escalating.  College graduates still earn more than high school graduates and are less likely to be unemployed—but the gap has been contracting.
And the income and employment benefits may overstate the lifetime effects of college degrees. The college wealth premium—the amount of extra wealth college graduates have accumulate the course of their lifetime—has declined even more rapidly than the income and employment premium, according to a recent study by the Federal Reserve. And among blacks, Hispanics, Asians—that is, everyone except whites—there is no wealth premium at all, the study found.
After ten years, nearly one-third of college graduates wind up in a job that does not require a college degree, the Wall Street Journal reports.
That should not be surprising. It demonstrates that the supply of college graduates has outpaced demand, which is exactly what you would expect would happen when ample subsidies and societal pressure are applied to increase college attendance. When, as Ms. Trump put it, “all the money pushes you into a four-year college system.”
The average sticker-price of a four-year college, including room and board, is now $50,000 per year. As Barron’s Jack Hough recently pointed out, $200,000 in cash invested in the name of a 22 year old would produce a $3 million retirement nest egg by the age of 68, if the money is invested at about a 6% year return.
This high price is being financed by debt. On average, a college graduate owes twice as much debt as she did twenty years ago, according to the Wall Street Journal.  Educational loans now amount to more than $1.5 trillion. More than one out of ten student loan borrowers will default on their loans.
Federal Reserve economists recently studied the impact all that debt is having on those aged 24 to 32. They found that while it plays a significant role in keeping young people from buying homes, although other factors—including the high price of homes—were more important.
“In surveys, young adults commonly report that their student loan debts are preventing them from buying a home,” Fed researchers Alvaro Mezza, Daniel Ringo, and Kamila Sommer found. “Our estimates suggest that increases in student loan debt are an important factor in explaining their lowered homeownership rates, but not the central cause of the decline.”
This is having a profound effect on American society. People are getting married later, which reduces the number of children they have. Women, in particular, delay marriage when they bear lots of student debt. And a significant number of people who say they do not want children cited student debt as the reason.
Twenty-two percent of college graduates were delayed by at least two years in moving out of a family member’s home due to their student loans, a survey of millennials by the National Association of Realtors found. More than half of respondents said they were delayed in continuing their education or starting a family due to student loan debt.
Bernie Sanders and others who have endorsed the idea of relieving students of the burden of paying for college address the debt side of the problem only. And it’s not clear that this is really much progress at all since professors will still have to be paid, buildings maintained, textbooks purchased. So while a student might not have to foot the bill, that debt will need to be borne by workers—which is really just a transformation of individual debt into higher taxes. And if history is any experience, the government will not effectively be able to contain the burgeoning costs. If anything, quite the opposite: cost increases will accelerate once individuals no longer see the bills.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, even if in a college cafeteria.
The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. We have a problem, as Ms. Trump has indicated. Others in Washington, DC, should take note.

you can't separate the Obomb from his Saudis paymasters!


Barack Obama’s back door, however, was unique to him. Before prosecutors send some of the dimmer Hollywood stars to the slammer for their dimness, they might want to ask just how much influence a Saudi billionaire peddled to get Obama into Harvard.

 


BARACK OBAMA and his SAUDIS PAYMASTERS: Did they build his Muslim tower in Chicago?

Malia, Michelle, Barack and the College Admissions Scandal


What shocked even the old timers in my hometown was that Mayor Hugh Addonizio, the man who gave me my Eagle Scout Award, would accept kickbacks in cash right across his desk. They were troubled less by his criminality -- that was expected in Newark -- than by his lack of subtlety. Addonizio paid for his indiscretion with a lengthy prison sentence.
So it is with the current college admissions scandal. People have been scamming their ways into prestige universities for decades, maybe centuries, but in the past they have had the good sense not to put the cash on the table. It seems that in this scandal a few of the bribers and their brokers may well pay for their indiscretion with prison sentences as well.
The media pretend to be shocked. In an editorial on the scandal, the New YorkTimes singled out Harvard University for its “special admissions preferences and back doors for certain applicants.” This is the same New York Times, however, that published an entirely uncritical article three years prior headlined, “Malia Obama Rebels, Sort of, by Choosing Harvard.” 
Malia is the fourth member of the Obama family to attend that august university, none of whom, save perhaps for Grandpa Obama, deserved to be there.
Let’s start with Obama Sr., the only member of the extended family to attend college before the affirmative action/diversity era. Obama arrived at Harvard in the early 1960s with the goal of getting a Ph.D. in economics. According to biographer Sally Jacobs, Obama “struggled” with his studies but managed to get a Masters degree.
Alas, the university booted him on moral grounds before he could get his doctorate. An inveterate playboy despite his two ongoing marriages, Obama had an affair with a high-school girl. Denied his Ph.D., says Jacobs, “He goes on to claim the title, nonetheless. He's Dr. Obama. The older he gets, the more he claims it.” As will be seen, intellectual fraud runs in the family.
Michelle was the next to attend Harvard, in her case Harvard Law School. Told by counselors that her SAT scores and her grades weren’t good enough for an Ivy League school,” writes Christopher Andersen in Barack and Michelle, “Michelle applied to Princeton and Harvard anyway.”
Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, “Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well.” She did not write well either. Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community," as “dense and turgid.”
The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observed,  “To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be ‘read’ at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language.” Hitchens exaggerated only a little.  The following summary statement by Michelle captures her unfamiliarity with many of the rules of grammar and most of logic:
The study inquires about the respondents' motivations to benefit him/herself, and the following social groups: the family, the Black community, the White community, God and church, The U.S. society, the non-White races of the world, and the human species as a whole.
Michelle even typed badly.  Still, she was admitted to and graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law.  I have been told by those on the inside that there are ways of recognizing affirmative-action admissions. Still, one almost feels sorry for Michelle.  She was in so far over her head it is no wonder she projected her angst onto the white people around her. “Regardless of the circumstances underwhich [sic] I interact with whites at Princeton,” she wrote in the opening of her thesis, “it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."
Barack was the smarter and better educated half of the couple. That said, had Obama’s father come from Kentucky not Kenya and been named O’Hara not Obama, there would been no Harvard Law Review, no Harvard, no Columbia.
In his overly friendly biography, The Bridge, David Remnick writes that Obama was an “unspectacular” student in his two years at Columbia and at every stop before that going back to grade school. A Northwestern University prof who wrote a letter of reference for Obama reinforces the point, telling Remnick, “I don’t think [Obama] did too well in college.” As to Obama’s LSAT scores, Jimmy Hoffa’s body will be unearthed before those are.
How such an indifferent student got into a law school whose applicants’ LSAT scores typically track between 98 to 99 percentile and whose GPAs range between 3.80 and 4.00 is a subject Remnick avoids.
Obama does too. Although he has admitted that he “undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs” during his academic career, he has remained mum about some reported “back door” influence peddling that may have been as useful to him as affirmative action.
In late March 2008 the venerable African-American entrepreneur and politico Percy Sutton appeared on a local New York City show called "Inside City Hall." When asked about Obama by the show’s host, Dominic Carter, the former Manhattan borough president calmly and lucidly explained that he had been “introduced to [Obama] by a friend.”
The friend's name was Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, and the introduction had taken place about twenty years prior. Sutton described al-Mansour as "the principal adviser to one of the world's richest men." The billionaire in question was Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the same billionaire whose anti-Semitism caused Mayor Rudy Giuliani to reject his $10 million gift to New York City post 9/11.
According to Sutton, al-Mansour had asked him to "please write a letter in support of [Obama]... a young man that has applied to Harvard." Sutton had friends at Harvard and gladly did so.
Three months before the election it should have mattered that a respected black political figure had publicly announced that an unapologetic anti-Semite like al-Mansour, backed by an equally anti-Semitic Saudi billionaire, had been guiding Obama’s career perhaps for the last twenty years, but the story died a quick and unnatural death.
As for Malia, whose grades and scores are as much a state secret as her father’s, the old man damns with the faint praise of  “capable” and “conscientious.” But hell, Bill’s daughter Chelsea got into Stanford and George’s daughter Barbara got into Yale, so this particular path to the back door was well worn.
Barack Obama’s back door, however, was unique to him. Before prosecutors send some of the dimmer Hollywood stars to the slammer for their dimness, they might want to ask just how much influence a Saudi billionaire peddled to get Obama into Harvard.

REALITY CHECK: MEXICANS WHO JUMP OUR BORDERS AND THEIR ANCHOR BABIES LOATHE ENGLISH AND LITERACY AND HAVE TURNED CA'S LOWER EDUCATION INTO THE WORST IN THE NATION!


"FOR ITS PART, Just Communities claims its trainings are aimed at closing what it characterizes as an achievement gap between Latino and white students."


Here’s one teacher’s report on the illegals in our schools.
TEACHER’S POSTING:
Subject: Cheap Labor This should make everyone think, be you Democrat, Republican or Independent from a California school teacher.
"As you listen to the news about the student protests over illegal immigration, there are some things that you should be aware of: I am in charge of the English-as-a-second-language department at a large southern California high school which is designated a Title 1 school, meaning that its students average lower socioeconomic and income levels. Most of the schools you are hearing about, South Gate High, Bell Gardens, Huntington Park, etc., where these students are protesting, are also Title 1 schools. Title 1 schools are on the free breakfast and free lunch program. When I say free breakfast, I'm not talking a glass of milk and roll -- but a full breakfast and cereal bar with fruits and juices that would make a Marriott proud. The waste of this food is monumental, with trays and trays of it being dumped in the trash uneaten. (OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK) I estimate that well over 50% of these students are obese or at least moderately overweight. About 75% or more DO have cell phones. The school also provides day care centers for the unwed teenage pregnant girls (some as young as 13) so they can attend class without the inconvenience of having to arrange for babysitters or having family watch their kids. (OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK) I was ordered to spend $700,000 on my department or risk losing funding for the upcoming year even though there was little need for anything; my budget was already substantial. I ended up buying new computers for the computer learning center, half of which, one month later, have been carved with graffiti by the appreciative students who obviously feel humbled and grateful to have a free education in America. (OUR TAX DOLLARS A T WORK) I have had to intervene several times for young and substitute teachers whose classes consist of many illegal immigrant students here in the country less then 3 months who raised so much hell with the female teachers, calling them "Putas" whores and throwing things that the teachers were in tears. Free medical, free education, free food, day care etc., etc., etc. Is it any wonder they feel entitled to not only be in this country but to demand rights, privileges and entitlements? To those who want to point out how much these illegal immigrants contribute to our society because they LIKE their gardener and housekeeper and they like to pay less for tomatoes: spend some time in the real world of illegal immigration and see the TRUE costs.


PARENTS SUE TO FIGHT


ANTI-WHITE, ANTI-


MALE, ANTI-CHRISTIAN, 


COMMUNIST 


INDOCTRINATION IN 


CALIFORNIA


Leftist group “Just Communities” is in the legal crosshairs.

February 22, 2019

Parents in Santa Barbara, California, are suing a leftist hate group called Just Communities and the local school board there to end the group’s taxpayer-funded so-called implicit bias training that has a powerful anti-white, anti-male, and anti-Christian slant.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, was brought by Fair Education Santa Barbara, a nonprofit formed by parents of children enrolled in the Santa Barbara Unified School District (SBUSD).
The group’s lawyer, Eric Early, calls the curriculum used in the district “radical, discriminatory, and illegal.” In a letter to the district’s counsel last September he wrote that “[t]eachers, parents and students have confidentially expressed their concerns that … [the] discriminatory curriculum has led to increased racial animosity toward Caucasian teachers and students.”
Just Communities (its full name is Just Communities Central Coast) has a contract with the Santa Barbara Unified School District to indoctrinate young people into believing that America today is a manifestly immoral, cruel country in which white people routinely oppress non-whites, men oppress women, Christians oppress non-Christians, heterosexuals oppress gays, and the wealthy oppress the poor.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Marxist theorist Paulo Freire urged that schools be used to inculcate radical values in students to transform them into agents of social change. Freire argued that the so-called dominant pedagogy “silences” poor and minority children and that there is no such thing as a neutral educational system. Teachers today are also smitten with the ahistorical, anti-American screeds of Howard Zinn, a Communist Party USA member whose writings they treat as gospel.
Early said the lawsuit aims to halt what he calls a “creeping, social justice warrior, alt-left takeover of the Santa Barbara Unified School District.”
The lawsuit “is doing its best to stop this outfit, Just Communities Central Coast, from continuing to indoctrinate the teachers and young, vulnerable minds of the district with Alinskyist training and beliefs,” Early said.
“The bottom line is it’s time to stop the far-left indoctrination of the district’s teachers and students and it’s time to bring to light what’s really going on in these classrooms to parents who had no idea before this came to light.”
The legal complaint states the SBUSD has “wholeheartedly supported and promoted JCCC’s discriminatory program” and has paid the group more than $1 million since 2013. On Sept. 11, 2018, the school board “considered contracting with JCCC for [an] additional 4 years at a cost to the taxpayers of more than $1.7 million.” On Oct. 8, 2018, the board “renewed its contract with JCCC for another year at a cost to the taxpayers of nearly $300,000.”
SBUSD, according to the complaint, is violating the U.S. Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “as they discriminate on the basis of … race” by “intentionally supporting, promoting and implementing JCCC’s programming in SBUSD’s schools with knowledge of its racially discriminatory content and application, which has created a racially hostile educational environment for many teachers and students.”
Fair Education Santa Barbara wants the court to terminate Just Communities’ contract with the school district and filed for a preliminary injunction to freeze the contract while the lawsuit proceeds. The motion for an injunction and other pending motions are expected to be heard by the court in Los Angeles this Monday, Feb. 25.
Fair Education says the injunction is justified because a California statute provides that when a public actor like a school district wants to hire people to do certain work for the district, with very limited exceptions the contracts have to be submitted for public bidding, which was not done in this case.
For its part, Just Communities claims its trainings are aimed at closing what it characterizes as an achievement gap between Latino and white students. Critics counter that the group is trying to turn students into left-wing revolutionaries by encouraging them to become political activists who view the world through the Marxist lens of race, sex, and class.
The complaint states that “[u]nder the guise of promoting so-called ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘inclusivity’ instruction, JCCC’s actual curriculum and practices are overtly and intentionally anti-Caucasian, anti-male, and anti-Christian.”
The training materials used by Just Communities are similar to those used by the extreme-left Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC had to pay almost $3.4 million in 2018 to settle a lawsuit with former Islamic radical Maajid Nawaz whom it falsely labeled an anti-Muslim extremist.
America is a deeply racist country, according to the Marxist-influenced, politically correct training materials. White people enjoy special “privilege” because they are white and gain “[u]nearned access to resources that enhance one’s chances of getting what one needs or influencing others in order to lead a safe, productive, fulfilling life.”
“Oppression based on notions of race is pervasive in U.S. society and many other societies and hurts us all, although in different and distinct ways,” the material also states.
It continues, describing “classism” as “[a] system of oppression based on socio-economic class that privilege (white) people who are wealthy and target people (of color) who are poor or working class. Classism also refers to the economic system that creates excessive inequality and causes basic human needs to go unmet.”
“The work of dismantling racism is an ongoing process, not a one-time event, seminar, or course from which one graduates,” the material states. “The process calls for a lifelong commitment to eliminating all injustice."
Just Communities’ bigoted indoctrination is the very antithesis of our aspirational goals for all students,” James Fenkner of Fair Education Santa Barbara told FrontPage via email.
Fenkner has four daughters, three of whom attend school in the school district.
“I fully support the suit because I fundamentally believe that everyone should be judged upon the quality of their character, not the color of their skin,” he said. “Just Communities’ divisive curriculum, as evidence by their grotesque ‘Forms of Oppression,’ poisons the well of goodwill between all children and perpetuates the dead-end notions of group victimhood, guilt, and retribution.”
The “Forms of Oppression” grid to which Fenkner refers is part of a bundle of teaching materials used by Just Communities. The horizontal table states, for example, that “racism” is a “form of oppression” that the “privilege group” of “white people” use to take aim at the “target group” of “people of color.” The grid uses the same format to describe “sexism,” “heterosexism,” “classism,” and so on.
Jarrod Schwartz, executive director of Just Communities, denied the substance of the allegations against his group, according to the Santa Barbara Independent.
“It’s not who we are, not what we do,” Schwartz said. “The work is not about blame or guilt,” he said. “We’re very intentional about not saying people are oppressors. It’s systems that are unequal.”
Santa Barbara’s education sector has become infected with doctrinaire radicalism.
Santa Barbara City College adjunct professor Celeste Barber appeared on “Fox & Friends” Jan. 30 to tell how she was heckled at a Jan. 24 meeting of the college’s board of trustees. Attendees tried to shout down Barber, who is a member of Fair Education Santa Barbara, when she spoke out against the board’s ban on reciting the Pledge of Allegiance during meetings.
SBCC board president Robert Miller previously told Barber by email that the pledge was banned because it contains the phrase “one nation under God” and because it is “steeped in expressions of nativism and white nationalism.”
“There is nothing white nationalist about the Pledge of Allegiance,” Barber told Fox.
“There’s no reference to race, to gender to ethnicity. It’s all inclusive. That’s why school children around the country, thousands of them recite it every day because it includes everybody who lives in this country.”
Bad publicity forced the SBCC to drop the ban. The college announced on Facebook the day before Barber’s television appearance that the Pledge “will be recited” at board meetings “until some future date when the matter may be reconsidered by the Board.”
And Santa Barbara is just one of many communities across America that has come under the control of radical education theorists and practitioners.

College-Grad Salaries Eroded by Hidden Army of 1.5 Million Visa-Workers


Every CEO in every company sees the business opportunity: Will I earn higher profits by replacing my American staff with cheaper H-1B workers? The answer is an obvious yes.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with foreign labor. That process spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy also drives up real estate priceswidens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California  


A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.


By Steve Baldwin


American Spectator, October 19, 2017


What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. 
The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. 

AMERICA: MEXICO’S WELFARE STATE

… and in exchange we get 40 million Mexican flag wavers, homelessness, a housing crisis, heroin & opioid crisis and jobs for legals crisis…. ALL THANKS TO THE DEMOCRAT PARTY

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-cheap-is-staggering-cost-of-mexicos.html

“Thirteen years after welfare reform, the share of immigrant-headed households (legal and illegal) with a child (under age 18) using at least one welfare program continues to be very high. This is partly due to the large share of immigrants with low levels of education and their resulting low incomes — not their legal status or an unwillingness to work. The major welfare programs examined in this report include cash assistance, food assistance, Medicaid, and public and subsidized housing.”  Steven A. Camarota

“Thirteen years after welfare reform, the share of immigrant-headed households (legal and illegal) with a child (under age 18) using at least one welfare program continues to be very high. This is partly due to the large share of immigrants with low levels of education and their resulting low incomes — not their legal status or an unwillingness to work. The major welfare programs examined in this report include cash assistance, food assistance, Medicaid, and public and subsidized housing.”  Steven A. Camarota


ILLEGALS CLIMBING CALIFORNIA’S BORDERS FOR JOBS AND WELFARE: SAN DIEGO … Mexicans (unregistered democrat anchor baby breeders (1,877).

In just the month of October 2017 CBP Border Patrol San Diego border sector reported apprehension of individuals from Bangladesh (12), Brazil (1), Camaroon (3), Chad (1), China (16), El Salvador (76), Eritrea (7), Gambia (4), Guatemala (178), Honduras (54), India (101), Iran (1), Mexico (1,877), Nepal (31), Nicaragua (1), Pakistan (13), Peru (1), Somalia (1), and “Unknown” (1) — a total of 2,379 individuals. These numbers are similar to volumes seen in this sector for October since 2012. MICHELLE MOONS


THE ONCE GOLDEN STATE of CALIFORNA, NOW A LA RAZA MEX WELFARE STATE, IS No. 48 OF 50 STATES IN LOWER EDUCATION!

 

MEXICANS LOATHE LITERACY AND ENGLISH… SUCH APES THE GRINGO WHOM THEY HATE!

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/08/heres-reason-why-ca-schools-are-no.html

  

“Mexicans abhor education. In their country, illiteracy dominates. As they arrive in our country, only 9.6 percent of fourth generation Mexicans earn a high school diploma. Mexico does not promote educational values. This makes them the least educated of any Americans or immigrants. The rate of illiteracy in Mexico stands at 63 percent." FROSTY WOOLRIDGE

 

“Third-generation Latinos are more often disconnected — that is, they neither attend school nor find employment.” Kay S. Hymowitz 

IMPORTING ILLITERACY


TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED WE NEED ENDLESS HORDES OF ILLITERATES JUMPING OUR BORDERS AND JOBS!

That really build a nation? Or just generate “cheap” labor for fast food operators?

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/11/daca-fails-loathing-of-literacy-and.html

 

Pollak: Educating Illegal Aliens and Their Children Costs L.A. Schools Hundreds of Millions Per Year



Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty
18 Jan 2019164
3:03

The ongoing strike by the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union against the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is about teacher pay, classroom size, support staff, and especially charter schools, which the union says take money away from the district.

Left unspoken, however, is the cost of educating illegal aliens, and their children — which could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars per year, if not billions, experts say.
Steven A. Camarota, director of research, at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News on Friday that “between one-fifth and one-fourth of the students in LAUSD are the children of illegal immigrants — though most of those were born in the U.S.” He said that a smaller percentage of the students (“in the single digits”) are illegal immigrants themselves.
With roughly 700,000 students in the district, at a cost of over $13,000 per student, that means the district could be spending about $1.8 billion annually on educating the children of illegal immigrants. The total annual expenses for the LAUSD in 2017-2018 amounted to $7.52 billion.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) put the cost of educating the children of illegal aliens statewide at over $12 billion in a 2014 study. A significant proportion of those students are served by the LAUSD.
Twenty years before, with a much lower population of illegal aliens, the U.S. General Accounting Office — in a study prepared for then-Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) estimated that California spent $1.6 billion on educating the children of illegal aliens. The cost has increased almost tenfold as the “undocumented” population has grown.
The exact numbers are elusive, but even a conservative estimate would put the costs of educating the children of illegal aliens in the LAUSD in the same ballpark as the costs of charter schools, which unions complain cost the district some $600 million per year in lost funding.
The U.S. Supreme Court held in Plyler v. Doe (1982) that students could not be denied a free public education on the basis of their immigration status.
However, the continued arrival of illegal aliens has arguably strained the public education system — and will continue to do so unless the country’s borders are secured.
Yet no one in L.A. seems to be discussing the problem.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

  
THE REAL LATINO IN OUR SCHOOLS

Here’s one teacher’s report on the illegals in our schools.

Subject: Cheap Labor?

This should make everyone think, be you Democrat, Republican or Independent From a California school teacher.

"As you listen to the news about the student protests over illegal immigration, there are some things that you should be aware of:  I am in charge of the English-as-a-second-language department at a large southern California high school which is designated a Title 1 school, meaning that its students average lower socioeconomic and income levels.  Most of the schools you are hearing about, South Gate High, Bell Gardens, Huntington Park, etc., where these students are protesting, are also Title 1 schools.  Title 1 schools are on the free breakfast and free lunch program. When I say free breakfast, I'm not talking a glass of milk and roll -- but a full breakfast and cereal bar with fruits and juices that would make a Marriott proud. The waste of this food is monumental, with trays and trays of it being dumped in the trash uneaten. (OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK)  I estimate that well over 50% of these students are obese or at least moderately overweight. About 75% or more DO have cell phones. The school also provides day care centers for the unwed teenage pregnant girls (some as young as 13) so they can attend class without the inconvenience of having to arrange for babysitters or having family watch their kids. (OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK)  I was ordered to spend $700,000 on my department or risk losing funding for the upcoming year even though there was little need for anything; my budget was already substantial. I ended up buying new computers for the computer learning center, half of which, one month later, have been carved with graffiti by the appreciative students who obviously feel humbled and grateful to have a free education in America. (OUR TAX DOLLARS A T WORK)  I have had to intervene several times for young and substitute teachers whose classes consist of many illegal immigrant students here in the country less then 3 months who raised so much hell with the female teachers, calling them "Putas" whores and throwing things that the teachers were in tears.  Free medical, free education, free food, day care etc., etc., etc. Is it any wonder they feel entitled to not only be in this country but to demand rights, privileges and entitlements? To those who want to point out how much these illegal immigrants contribute to our society because they LIKE their gardener and housekeeper and they like to pay less for tomatoes: spend some time in the real world of illegal immigration and see the TRUE costs.



October 12, 2018

Why the Hispanic Education Gap?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/10/why_the_hispanic_education_gap.html

 

An article published by the Pew Research Center authored by Jens Manuel Krogstad, titled "5 Facts about Latinos and Education," states, "Hispanic dropout rate remains higher than that of Blacks, Whites, and Asians."  This hit home for me, because virtually no one else in my family has a degree – college or otherwise.
Being Hispanic, I find it nearly impossible to avoid hearing my own culture being talked about in the media – especially now that DACA, the border wall, and Trump are all being discussed, often in one sentence.  The one thing that is rarely talked about is our education system and how Hispanics keep falling behind.  The relationship between our culture and the educational system needs restructuring.
Hispanic-Americans are growing in numbers and in cultures.  I use the term "cultures" because Hispanics come in all races and backgrounds, and because of this, they also have their own varying sets of traditions and values.  Latinos desire an education, but their actions do not correlate with their aspirations.  They want an education but do not do what is necessary to obtain it.  Hispanics are the majority-minority group in America, yet they have the lowest level of educational attainment of any major demographic slice of the U.S.  Latinos who do not come from an independent educational tradition are the ones who get hurt.
There is a disconnect between our society and our cultural beliefs.  Most Hispanics of my acquaintance understand the importance of getting an education, but only in so far as it leads to immediate earnings to help take care of the family.  Often these two goals are in conflict, and families will choose jobs over education.  For many Hispanics, including me, a drive for educational achievement was never something our families cared to instill.  My mother expressed the importance of learning another language and going to school but always enforced getting a job and helping support the family as the first priority.
As the Pew article touched on, Latinos dream of going to college and often do, but their culture does not push them toward it.  Hispanics are told things like: "That's not for you" or "You have to find a spouse and have kids and raise them."  Rarely are we told things like "Go after your education."  The few that do break from the cycle and go to college run into a plethora of problems, ranging from the micro-fiduciary issues to the macro-family issues.
Growing up, I was always in competition with my cousin Joe, from elementary to high school.  We lived in the same household, and would compare grades.  I always felt inferior.  Joe was always making the grades I could not and reading books beyond his grade level.  He would often go above and beyond with his assignments to ensure an A in every class.  Joe had a thirst for knowledge, and anyone who spoke to him instantly knew he was going to make something of himself.  While he was a shoe-in for a prestigious college, I would be lucky to get accepted anywhere.
It came as a big shock to my family and me when Joe dropped out of high school.  He dropped out because he was bored with the education he was receiving and it felt like a waste of his time, getting something that would not mean anything.  He later decided to obtain his GED so he could gain entry into a college for a real education.
Our high school education system is not challenging our bright minds, but is instead leading them into a vicious cycle of mediocrity.  Over the years, I found college banal and easy, not because I studied and changed my ways, but because I took easy courses and easy professors who would help me obtain that "piece of paper."  As I moved up from freshman to junior year, I noticed a steady decline in grades once I found myself in more rigorous courses.  I fell more and more behind when compared to my peers.  Subsequently, at the community college, my cousin was bored with the same mediocre teaching methods that caused him to drop out of high school.  Therefore, it came as no surprise when he again dropped out of school.
I obtained financial aid and scholarships to help pay for college and later grad school.  I graduated with my B.A. with almost no debt.  Money was not the issue for me, and if one's willing to jump through hoops, college can be paid for.  The difficulties after getting into college were in finding peers I could look up to; coming across ways not to feel inferior to my classmates; discovering where I belonged in a sea of students who did not share my culture or customs; and finding ways to separate myself from my family, who constantly needed me.
Our paths at one point seemed so intertwined that it is hard to understand what went wrong.  I ultimately graduated, went on to graduate school, and am now a university professor.  Joe, on the other hand, continues to progress through life without nurturing his natural intellectual affinity.  How did a smart kid, who was bound for success, fail at something that was second nature to him?  Experts keep claiming that it is a money issue, but in fact, that is the smallest issue.  The big problem had to do with his education and culture.
Growing up Hispanic, we are told things as children that stay with us through adulthood.  We are told family is everything.  You never turn your back on them and stay nearby because they will always be there for you.  Our parents tell us to want more but do not offer support when we go after our educational dreams.  Frequently, discouraging remarks are made: "Why are you wasting your time with that, get a job" or "You could be making money and starting a family."  We do not get a support network.  I was able to see this subtle influence only once I moved away to start grad school in Indiana, at Purdue University.
I was not a talented student, or even very smart.  My family never supported my choices or my dream of getting a degree.  Sure, they would say things like "go after it," but the moment it became an inconvenience, they told me to stop.  If it were not for a professor who saw potential and took an interest in me, I might have been in Joe's shoes now.  My mentor pushed me and challenged me to be better.  Once I left my family, I began to see what was keeping me down: it was my own beliefs and family.  These traits are passed down from one generation to another in a never-ending cycle.  In order to break that cycle and succeed, I turned my back on my culture and my family.
Joe stayed close to the family around the same location where he grew up.  He got married, bought a house with his wife, and found jobs that paid.  Those jobs are not writing jobs, but they pay frequently and often.  He became a waiter and later a bartender.  He is able to pay his bills and go on trips.  He did everything our culture wanted him to do.  All he had to do was give up on his dreams of becoming a sports journalist.  I, on the other hand, was not ready to let mine go.
It was years later that Joe told me he dropped out of college.  He got tired of students leaving after four years of college and knowing as much as they did when they entered the classroom in year one.  He got tired of professors demanding the very minimum on assignments and giving him a B, which for many colleges has become the new average.  He continued, "Why would I waste my time working hard to get the same grades as someone who spends most of his time smoking, getting drunk, and not studying?  I thought college would be harder, but instead it is exactly like high school."  He wanted to be proud of himself and to be around people who valued an education.
Joe would not settle for anything less than a real education.  It is because of this that I get so upset that in a diverse class of 22 students, with eight Hispanics on average, I will have five failing my class.  Too many Hispanics are failing college, and it is not because they are stupid; it is cultural.  My Latino students often give me legitimate explanations as to why they cannot complete the course, but the constant excuse is for family reasons.  Joe would have been one of the few Hispanics who would be passing a rigorous college-level course.  Joe was so skilled in a system that shortchanged him in high school and again in college that he was not able to achieve more.  He might have been a great journalist, but who knows now?
Hispanic-Americans need to start claiming our educational voices and talking about our educational system.  The problem is not money; it is our attitude toward our education.  Our system needs to know that we are not doing well, but are indeed languishing behind.  Our friends, family, and culture should adapt, and parents need to be involved in their children's educational outcomes.  If Hispanics are in trouble, so are we all.



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